Photo by Brook van der Linde
By Emma Castleberry
Haywood Street Congregation has partnered with Colorado organization RAWtools to become an official disarming location for people who want to surrender weapons. Brook van der Linde, lead storyteller at Haywood Street, spearheaded the effort to obtain training and is also an official “disarmer.”
Photo by Michael Martin of RAW Tools
“After the Colorado Springs shooting in May of 2021, I felt like Haywood Street had to do something, even if only symbolically, to show we acknowledge the pain caused by gun violence and, often coexisting, mental illness in our country,” she says. “We have a number of beloved congregants whose lives have been negatively affected by firearms, whether by prison time, suicide of a loved one or in other ways. To me, it seems like church should always be a place where you can lay down your weapons.”
In the US, more than 100 people die from gun violence each day. A gun in the home is three times more likely to harm the homeowner or someone they love than to be used against an intruder. This likelihood jumps to five times if you are a woman, and even higher if you identify as BIPOC or LGBTQ.
Only guns registered in North Carolina can be surrendered at Haywood Street, as the gun cannot cross state lines. The congregation files paperwork with RAWtools and then sets a date and time for the disarming. The owner brings the unloaded, locked gun and must be present during the entire disarming process to ensure there is no transfer of gun ownership.
Pastors are available for support during this time. “Once the gun is properly cut,” says van der Linde, “it is packaged and mailed to Colorado Springs, where the folks at RAWtools forge the metal, turn the gun into a garden tool and then mail this garden tool back to Haywood Street to be used in our community flower and vegetable gardens. By ‘beating swords into plowshares,’ we have the opportunity to create a symbol for change. We are not under the illusion that gun violence will end because of the number of firearms that we are able to put through the fire. But, we can be a piece of the change; we can be a part of something good while we walk towards something better.”
Plowside. Photo by Michael Martin of RAW Tools
Michael Martin, executive director of RAWtools, provided training through a series of emails and diagrams that showed the disarmers at Haywood Street how to properly cut an array of firearms. Haywood Street, which disarmed its first gun in December, is one of the first organizations to become a part of the RAWtools disarming network. The network currently includes more than 50 people, most of whom are volunteering as individuals with access to the tools needed to disable a firearm. “Haywood Street is the start of something growing across the country where more organizations and faith communities are becoming more public about being a place where people can have their unwanted firearms disabled,” says Martin.
The philosophy behind RAWtools is one of healing, which happens at every phase of the process—from the donation of the firearm, to the disarming process, to the rebirth of the gun as a gardening tool that allows folks to “remember their loved ones, while also making an impact on their own legacy and transforming it into something else,” Martin says. “The long-term vision is having RAWtools cooperatives across the country doing the work of turning guns into garden tools, but also being a part of offering services and resources to their community that help lower the rates of gun violence.”
For more information, visit RAWtools.org or HaywoodStreet.org.
